Modern integrated circuits or “chips” perform a wide variety of functions in the electronic systems with which people interact daily. The chips are a result of highly complex circuit designs, architectures, and implementations, and are integral to electronic systems for providing communications, computing, and networking, whether the electronic systems have applications for business, entertainment, or consumer electronics. The electronic systems routinely contain more than one chip, and the chips perform such critical functions as computation, storage, and control. The chips are used to compute algorithms and heuristics, handle data, communicate internally and externally to the electronic system, and so on, in support of the purposes of the electronic systems. Since there are so many computations that must be performed, any improvements made in the efficiency of the computations add up to a large impact on overall system performance. As the amount of data to be handled increases, the approaches that are used to compute and handle the data must be not only effective, efficient, and economical, but must also scale as the amount of data increases.
Technological advances in integrated circuit manufacturing processes enable the production of integrated electronic systems comprising tens of millions, hundreds of millions, or an even greater number of active devices. The active devices contained in an integrated circuit include transistors (bipolar, FET, etc.), diodes, optoelectronic devices, and so on. Increased numbers of insulation and interconnection layers serve to further expand opportunities for complex data paths and more powerful control schemes. As a result, the demand for advanced integrated circuits has driven the development and production of circuits with increased electronic system performance, decreased device size, and greater system feature sets, among many other benefits. One direct result of technological and systemic improvements is an ever-increasing trend towards design complexity. The design complexity of the electronic systems creates difficult engineering challenges surrounding circuit design, system implementation and control, chip fabrication, and the like. This complexity demands increased and meticulous scrutiny of logic circuits, interconnection schemes, systems architectures, and system control. New fabrication technologies, system architectures, and circuit families have been developed which are capable of taking advantage of reduced total device count, smaller device sizes, and simplified wiring/control schemes (e.g. datapaths/control paths). Each circuit family provides its own engineering tradeoffs and requires careful design considerations.
Two broad categories of electronic circuits are used in the construction of integrated circuits. These circuit categories include static circuits and dynamic circuits. Both static and dynamic circuits are used to form the basis of many types of electronic circuits including digital logic, memories, communications circuits, analog circuits, programmable devices, and so on. Static circuits are used primarily in applications where signal integrity and system robustness take priority over other design criteria, such as circuit density and power consumption. In contrast, dynamic circuits are applied where system performance and circuit density are critical. Portable and personal electronic devices such as smartphones, PDAs, tablets, and personal computers, among others require memory and microprocessor circuits with high circuit density, high system performance, extensive feature sets, and low power consumption, to name a few requirements. In order to ensure that the integrated circuits and the systems that contain them will operate properly, testing is performed at many points in the design and fabrication processes. The testing includes circuit modeling and simulation, chip fabrication verification, and so on. The simulation, modeling, and verification are highly computationally intensive because of the extreme complexity and density of the circuits and systems. Efficiency and efficacy are key factors to the success and cost effectiveness of the many manufacturing steps, testing procedures, and processes.